In recent years, consumers have enjoyed traditional media over the Internet. For example, with the advent of Internet radio and Internet TV, consumers have been using their Internet-enabled computers to listen to music and to watch videos. Contents that can be downloadable over the Internet include music, talk shows, presentations, interactive applications, games, video, audio books, other stream-enabled media, or any combination thereof. These contents are generally delivered to recipient devices through online distribution systems using proprietary distribution software and hardware.
The difficulty of an online distribution system is that as requestors for the media streams increase, the total available bandwidth decreases. For example, user experience for popular video stream services may be crippled by the popularity of the service.
Existing online distribution services have tried to improve their distribution services by proposing solutions to reduce the amount of data moved across the network. However, such improvements only mitigate the problem by reducing the inverse linear relationship between the number of users and bandwidth. As a result, user experience still declines as the number of users increase for a given online distribution service.
Specifically, users of online distribution systems do not have an effective tool to watch media files over the Internet. Providing users with efficient methods of delivering and streaming media files is valuable in providing a better user experience for users. However, existing systems have not provided users with tools or methods of presenting them with the most effective method of online media distribution.